Ruff Reckoning
A look back at Kirsten Bakis’s 1997 novel Lives of the Monster Dogs
This past summer, I quit my job in Australia to work at a rustic summer camp in Vermont, spending my days floating on the pond and reading on the grass. The camp’s cook had a little dog called Frankie, short for Frankenstein; we affectionately called Frankie “the rat,” which the cook hated. Frankie had a permanent snarl of crooked teeth and scruffy white fur, and she walked with a slight waddle. Sometimes when she was sleeping I thought maybe she’d died, but then she’d open her glassy eyes and I’d breathe a small sigh of relief.
That same summer I bought the twentieth-anniversary reissue of Kirsten Bakis’s 1997novel. I thought a lot about Frankie and camp and Vermont while I was reading it, as well as about my own dog Stephie,
